Biography

Jacob Sloan is an active member of the Howard University Non-Tenure Track Faculty Union and a PhD candidate at SUNY Buffalo (ABD). His research takes a comparative approach to the global proletarian novel and argues for the importance of proletarian realism as both a narrative and theoretical intervention that pushes marxism beyond stagist and mechanistic conceptions of historical motion. 

Jacob has published on Korean and South African proletarian fiction:  “Country and City in the Proletarian Realist Novel: Kang Kyŏng-ae’s From Wŏnso Pond and Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy." His most recent essay is a critical appraisal of Fredric Jameson's work and influence on marxist literary criticism: "Destined More for Use in the Night School than the Graduate Seminar: Fredric Jameson and Marxist Literary Criticism."

Other research interests include 19th- and 20th-century African American literature (especially the works of Harriet Wilson, Frances Harper, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry); marxist feminism and social reproduction theory; and resistance writing more broadly. Before coming to Howard, Jacob taught literature and writing classes at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.